May 28, 2017

You may be asking what is cryptocurrency. Well, Wikipedia describes it as:

A digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure the transactions and to control the creation of additional units of the currency. Cryptocurrencies are a subset of alternative currencies, or specifically of digital currencies.

Bitcoin was the first one out, and if you didn't know, as of the time of this writing Coinbase is reporting that 1 Bitcoin is currently worth $2,277.22! That's a lot of money, and it's value has only gone up over the last few years.

If you are unfamiliar with Bitcoin, I made this Tech Chop video a few years ago to talk about it:

So now you get the idea right? Well, Bitcoin isn't the only name in the cryptocurrency game. There are tons of other ones like Monero, Litecoin, FantomCoin etc. Almost too many to count. The problem with Bitcoin, even though it's the most mainstream of them is that mining it has really lost it's profitability. In the early days it was fairly easy to mine Bitcoins, and therefore the guys that got in early have made a ton of money by now, but that ship has sailed. That being said, since there are other cryptocurrencies, those of us late to the game still have a chance!

MinerGate is a mining pool created by a group of cryptocoin enthusiasts.

It is the first pool which provides service for merged mining. This means that while mining on our pool you can mine different coins simultaniously without decrease of hashrate for major coin

With MinerGate, you can easily mine other types of cryptocurrencies and
transfer them to a digital wallet that you can use to cash out to
dollars, or exchange for other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

A great free online wallet, that supports many cryptocurrencies that I recommend is Cryptonator. Cryptonator also lets you easily trade between currencies. If you are in Europe, it's also good to cash out to fiat currency like Euros.

If you are in America, I recommend converting your alternative cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin or Litecoin with Cryptonator, then transfer that to your free Coinbase account when you are ready to withdraw your money to dollars. I say that because a lot of foreign Bitcoin exchanges don't play well with American banks, but Coinbase does!

If you are new to cryptocurrency/cryptocoin and want to try out mining and see if it's right for you, then in my opinion there is no easier way of doing it than with MinerGate.

For those of you that have been doing this for a while, what other mining tools or programs do you recommend? Do you use MinerGate yourself? Do you like it? Let us know in the comments.

[EDIT]I found that it's actually easier to transfer your mined currency from MinerGate directly to your Coinbase account using Changelly! With Changelly, you can transfer any type of supported crypto-coin directly to any other type of crypto-coin. For instance, I just transferred my XMR (Monero) to my Litecoin wallet on Coinbase! Boom! Easy!